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Rituals, Routines, and Resilience 185

of a culture to honor time to connect with their grief and memory. O-Bon
is a shortened form of the legendary Ullambana festival. It is Sanskrit for
“hanging upside down” and implies great suffering. The Japanese believe
they should ameliorate the suffering of the Ullambana. O-Bon culmi-
nates with the Toro Nagashi, or the floating of lanterns. Paper lanterns
are painted in ink with the names and offerings for the dead, illuminated
with candles, and then floated down rivers symbolically signaling the
ancestral spirits’ return to the world of the dead. On August 6, hundreds
of thousands of people gathered on the banks of the Otagawa River, held
memorial services, and, in the evening, painted lanterns and floated them
in the river. That night, I stood and chanted with a number of the men
and women I had interviewed and watched the darkened river became a
river of light.
Three weeks upon my return, two planes were crashed into the World
Trade Centers, claiming close to 3,000 lives. The world had one reflec-
tive day of wondering what this means to our lives, and then the govern-
ment turned reactive and went to war. What was missing was a national
and city time to grieve and reflect. A year later, T.K. Nakagaki, a Jodo
Shinshu priest from the New York Buddhist Church, organized an O-Bon
ceremony on one of the piers on the Hudson River. Hundreds gathered to
chant together, participate in a memorial service, and paint hundreds of
lanterns with the names of the dead from 9/11 and beyond. The lanterns
were then sent out into the river.
What does this routine ritual have to do with flexibility? It is a teaching
that time is needed to gather together and create ceremony and ritual in
a regular way to honor the parts of us that have died or been destroyed.
When this doesn’t happen, we can’t gather together to tell our stories, rit-
ualize the moment, and connect to that which we have lost. In my experi-
ence as a chaplain and psychotherapist, it has been essential to clients’ and
patients’ healing process to have a set ritual of remembrance. It becomes
a touchstone of their year. Without such a time, they tend to drift in the
sea. Each loss, each disaster, and each change echoes each loss. How do we
create a container through ritual to hold this so that we as a culture can
become totally alive? What I mean by fully alive is to be connected to a
larger order of being. This differs from a psychological sense of aliveness
in that typically, although it is changing, psychological aliveness tends to
be limited to that person’s specific life. What is of interest to me is the con-
fluence of psychology and Buddhism and how there is a new blossoming
and commingling. The O-Bon ceremony is one such ritual.
The wonderful haiku poet, Basho, wrote: